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From the handful of RISC-V posts on HN over the years I'm surprised to learn that RISC-V is still so nascent—to the point that simply hosting a webpage on top o

From the handful of RISC-V posts on HN over the years I'm surprised to learn that RISC-V is still so nascent—to the point that simply hosting a webpage on top of it is bleeding edge. Is it being used for anything yet or is it mostly still in early development? Excuse my naivety, still excited for the tech. Great to see this progress regardless. Edit: and the song on the site, sounds like Dominican Bachata, like Anthony Santos or something.

BenoitP 4y ago
It gets good adoption as a small core for control. Nvidia uses it for internal scheduling in their newer GPUs, and Western Digital does too.
psychphysic 4y ago
This website is silly. After all if he installed a binary package of nginx what makes him think he is the only one to have ever done that? The original SiFive VisionFive is supported by both Fedora and Ubuntu.[0] As will the upcoming VisionFive2. There are likely many such servers out there. I believe some of Alibaba cloud infra runs on RISC-V don't quote me on it. [0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V
- dragonelite 4y ago
  Alibab's semi design studio T-Head is big in RISCV. they even ported android 10 to their RISCV processor xuantie
- gbraad 4y ago
  They run a large amount of their infra on it. Riscv is quite big here in China, as was Power a few years before, due to the bans.
  - uni_rule 4y ago
    The only power stuff I see in the us is the occasional mention of Talos Computing, old mac's, or game consoles. What other hardware has there been back there? Mostly servers?
tbyehl 4y ago
Andes Technology claimed 3B RISC-V shipments for 2021. There are at least a 16 RISC-V devices in my home right now in the form of ESP32-C3s powering smart bulbs, outlets, and light switches. The geek hype train is all about RISC-V taking on general-purpose computing but they've been quietly displacing Cortex-M0, Xtensa LX, etc in devices with fairly low computational needs.
johnklos 4y ago
Lots of people are running RISC-V, so this definitely isn't true any more. It was true at a time, but not any longer. OTOH, I run the only 1U VAX in the world (http://vlc.zia.io http://vlc.zia.io), and if anyone else were running anything similar, I'd have heard about it. Still waiting :)
- louwrentius 4y ago
  Would be cool to have some more context about the machine itself, it's history and the machine it's attached to through serial.
  - johnklos 4y ago
    Perhaps I'll have to make a HN post just for that some time :)
    - louwrentius 4y ago
      Looking forward to it!
- neilv 4y ago
  Nice! I wouldn't have guessed one could fit a VAXstation into that short-depth of a 1U. How do you cool it? (I normally see that Supermicro chassis model used for Atom boards designed to run fanless.)
  - johnklos 4y ago
    The VAXstation itself doesn't take much power and therefore doesn't generate too much heat. The power supply moves a small amount of air by virtue of its fans, but not much. It was tested and runs fine in a room at ambient temperature (72º), fully closed, with no external airflow. Because of this, it should never have issues where it's colocated because the datacenter has positive pressure cooling.
tyingq 4y ago
Most of the action seems to be in the RISC-V as MCU space thus far, since that's the simplest path that has significant cost savings opportunity. Western Digital, for example, can use them inside drives instead of ARM and get away from ARM's royalty model. RISC-V as a desktop or server CPU has economic incentive around it also, just not to the same degree.
ip26 4y ago
It has been popular on this site since very early. I think the audience here exhibits a lot of belief in the power/magic of open source. (It is, after all, a software focused community) It also started to pick up steam right as Intel was slowing performance advancement.
goodpoint 4y ago
> hosting a webpage on top of it is bleeding edge There's absolute nothing bleeding edge in that. The website is really pointless.

BenoitP 4y ago

It gets good adoption as a small core for control. Nvidia uses it for internal scheduling in their newer GPUs, and Western Digital does too.

psychphysic 4y ago

This website is silly. After all if he installed a binary package of nginx what makes him think he is the only one to have ever done that? The original SiFive VisionFive is supported by both Fedora and Ubuntu.[0] As will the upcoming VisionFive2. There are likely many such servers out there. I believe some of Alibaba cloud infra runs on RISC-V don't quote me on it. [0] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RISC-V

dragonelite 4y ago
Alibab's semi design studio T-Head is big in RISCV. they even ported android 10 to their RISCV processor xuantie
gbraad 4y ago
They run a large amount of their infra on it. Riscv is quite big here in China, as was Power a few years before, due to the bans.
- uni_rule 4y ago
  The only power stuff I see in the us is the occasional mention of Talos Computing, old mac's, or game consoles. What other hardware has there been back there? Mostly servers?

tbyehl 4y ago

Andes Technology claimed 3B RISC-V shipments for 2021. There are at least a 16 RISC-V devices in my home right now in the form of ESP32-C3s powering smart bulbs, outlets, and light switches. The geek hype train is all about RISC-V taking on general-purpose computing but they've been quietly displacing Cortex-M0, Xtensa LX, etc in devices with fairly low computational needs.

johnklos 4y ago

Lots of people are running RISC-V, so this definitely isn't true any more. It was true at a time, but not any longer. OTOH, I run the only 1U VAX in the world (http://vlc.zia.io http://vlc.zia.io), and if anyone else were running anything similar, I'd have heard about it. Still waiting :)

louwrentius 4y ago
Would be cool to have some more context about the machine itself, it's history and the machine it's attached to through serial.
- johnklos 4y ago
  Perhaps I'll have to make a HN post just for that some time :)
  - louwrentius 4y ago
    Looking forward to it!
neilv 4y ago
Nice! I wouldn't have guessed one could fit a VAXstation into that short-depth of a 1U. How do you cool it? (I normally see that Supermicro chassis model used for Atom boards designed to run fanless.)
- johnklos 4y ago
  The VAXstation itself doesn't take much power and therefore doesn't generate too much heat. The power supply moves a small amount of air by virtue of its fans, but not much. It was tested and runs fine in a room at ambient temperature (72º), fully closed, with no external airflow. Because of this, it should never have issues where it's colocated because the datacenter has positive pressure cooling.

tyingq 4y ago

Most of the action seems to be in the RISC-V as MCU space thus far, since that's the simplest path that has significant cost savings opportunity. Western Digital, for example, can use them inside drives instead of ARM and get away from ARM's royalty model. RISC-V as a desktop or server CPU has economic incentive around it also, just not to the same degree.

ip26 4y ago

It has been popular on this site since very early. I think the audience here exhibits a lot of belief in the power/magic of open source. (It is, after all, a software focused community) It also started to pick up steam right as Intel was slowing performance advancement.

goodpoint 4y ago

> hosting a webpage on top of it is bleeding edge There's absolute nothing bleeding edge in that. The website is really pointless.